By Amy Sherlock
Glenn Ligon, 'A Small Band' (2015) and Oscar Murillo, 'signalling devices now in bastard territory' (2015), installation view at the Central Pavilion, Giardini
I generally find Venice an uplifting sort of place. When the hazy, watery sunlight bounces off the campanile in San Marco or the dome of San Giorgio, it’s hard not to feel filled with wonder that such structures – which have stood, more or less unchanged, since the 15th century – were built in a lagoon. The whole city is a testimony equally to ingenuity and folly, as well as to the benefits of international trade and the patronage of the mercantile classes. Venice is also sinking, slowly, at a rate that has, over recent decades, increased due to rising sea levels. This inevitability, just far off enough to be unimaginable, makes the city a particularly interesting setting for an exhibition titled ‘All the World’s Futures’. Curator Okwui Enwezor’s central exhibition for the 56th Venice Biennale considers how contemporary artists are responding to the crises and instability of the globalized present. The Biennale’s own history as a cultural event inaugurated to celebrate the recently united Italian state and its structure – which is still informed by global power relations of the early 20th century – also make it a highly charged setting for considering what ‘all the world’ has historically meant.
A first glance at the central pavilion along one of the Giardini’s tree-lined avenues is enough to ascertain that a consideration of all the world’s futures implies a re-evaluation – and maybe re-writing – of certain narratives of the past. At the top of the pavilion’s bright white facade, a neon work by Glenn Ligon spells out ‘blues blood bruise’ – unlit, but forming firm dark lines in the bright sunlight (A Small Band, 2015). The work overwrites the words ‘La Biennale’, in parts seeming to blur with them, the forms becoming slightly unclear where letters overlap. Below, between the neo-classical columns that lead to the entrance, hang the 20 black canvas ‘flags’ of Oscar Murillo’s signalling devices in now bastard territory (2015). Both foreboding and theatrical, they create an ominous partition. My immediate reading of them is not as flags (without poles, without states) but as tarpaulins used for transport or concealment, or even as shrouds. They look sticky, dusty, heavy. I imagine suffocating beneath one.
Glenn Ligon,‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015, installation view, Central Pavilion
Ligon’s piece is related to four large works on canvas that hang in their own room within the pavilion (‘Come Out #12 – 15’, 2015). Across them, the words ‘come out to show them’ are over-printed repeatedly in black – swarming and gathering to the point of being illegible in places, like thunder-cloud haze. They seem to thrum, these canvases: you can almost hear the words as they stumble into one another, an indistinguishable chorus in some parts, a clear voice in others. Both the ‘Come Out’ works and A Small Band quote from the testimony on Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six young black men sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1965 on the grounds of forced confessions taken whilst in police custody. Hamm’s description of police brutality, recorded 50 years ago, feels devastatingly relevant against a backdrop of ongoing ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray whilst in police custody: the latest in a horrible succession of injustices that reflect the strained nature of the relationship between police forces and communities – and race relations more broadly – across the United States. A future in which history merely repeats itself is a sombre prospect indeed, a thought which sets the tone for the entire show.
Robert Smithson, Asphalt on Eroded Cliff, 1969, ink and coloured chalk on paper
The rest of the exhibition, however, can’t quite sustain the clout of this initial punch. It is a truism to say that an exhibition on this scale – including a whopping 136 artists – will necessarily be uneven. In this case, the breadth of the theme – to reflect all of the world’s crises and injustice – means that the varied responses end up almost cancelling one another out. Specific horrors like the Holocaust, referenced in Fabio Mauri’s The Western Wall or the Wailing Wall (1993), a stacked wall of suitcases that is the first sculpture visitors come across in the space, and forgotten histories (such as that of the revolutionary left in Bangladesh, which is the subject of Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Last Man in Dhaka Central [The Young Man Was, Part 3], 2015) sit alongside more speculative references (the barren earth suggested by Robert Smithson’s Dead Tree, 1969/2015) and works that gesture more broadly towards death or suffering (Marlene Dumas’s beautiful series of ‘Skulls’, 2013–15). The effect is overwhelming – which I’m sure is part of Enwezor’s intention – but also flattening. The result, for me at least, is a sense of helplessness and paralysis, rather than politicization or engagement.
Marlene Dumas, Skulls, 2013-15, oil on canvas
There are some powerful moments here – such as the inspired pairing of photographs from Walker Evans’s iconic images of Great Depression-era rural Americans (‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, first published in 1941) with Isa Genzken’s architectural maquettes for ‘Realized and Unrealized Outdoor Projects’. Painted ghostly white, with some proposals as simple as running Two Lines between the roofs of high-rise housing blocks to form a barely visible umbilical connection, these are timeless potential monuments. Read against Evans’s photographs, they speak of loss, frailty and resistance – and the idea that sometimes the most quotidian of objects and gestures are the ones worth commemorating. (A pair of monumental white orchids that stand quietly on the opposite side of the Giardini, Two Orchids (2015) are Genzken’s fully materialized testimony to these ideas.) John Akomfrah’s magisterial Vertigo Sea (2015) is another highlight. Shown over three vast screens, its dense, roiling montage combines archival footage of the hunting and butchering of whales and polar bears with underwater marine landscapes, aerial shots of birds flocking and dispersing like beads across the surface of the sea, and black and white photographic portraits that evoke the historical slave trade and, by association, a horrifyingly contemporary Mediterranean reality. The work is hypnotically beautiful yet oblique enough to hold all of the multiple and contradictory significances of the ocean – as freedom and the passage to enslavement, as environmental battleground, as provider and waste dump.
Walker Evans and Isa Genzken, installation view
The show in the Arsenale is more heavy-handed and didactic from the get-go, opening with a blackened room containing neons by Bruce Nauman flashing words and phrases including Eat Death (1972) and Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain (1983) and Adel Abdessemed’s Nympheas (2015) – clusters of knives pointing up from the ground, like deadly flowers. The whole thing feels simultaneously too literal and too general to be thought-provoking. Weapons recur – down the hall in a black cannon by Pino Pascali (Cannone Semovente, 1965), which detonates the forceful symbolism of Melvin Edwards’s tortured but contained ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–ongoing), buckled and twisted assemblages of scrap metal, hung from the wall like machinic stags’ heads. Alone these are eloquent, powerful works; amongst the cacophony of Terry Adkins’s aggressive music-machines and Monica Bonvicini’s black, rubber-clad chainsaws (Latent Combustion, 2015), their meaning feels over-determined. Moments of lightness – such as Ernesto Ballesteros’s wire and balsa wood planes that float like feathers to the floor, travelling no distance at all, the distance of a breath (Indoor Flights, 2015), and Mika Rottenberg’s film installation, which takes a wonderfully weird view of bodily functions and workplace productivity – are few and far between. And the most poignant encounters are those that take you by surprise – for instance, coming across Lorna Simpson’s dreamily delineated painted figures next to Goncalo Mabunda’s The Knowledge Throne (2014), made from decommissioned machine guns.
Monica Bonvicini, Latent Combustion, 2015, chainsaws, wood axe, black polyurethane, matt finish, steel chains
The through-line that seemingly underlies the various economic, social and environmental issues that different works address is capitalism – the ceaseless drive to produce wealth through the exploitation of resources, both human and environmental. This is placed literally centre stage (in an ‘Arena’ designed by architect David Adjaye) through an epic series of readings of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (1861, 1885, 1894) staged by Isaac Julien. Enwezor has called capital ‘the great drama of our age’ and, in so far as it determines almost every aspect of our lives, this may well be true. But Capital is not a dramatic text; it’s a rigorous and complex economic analysis, which gains little in either impact or understanding from being read aloud. As a reminder of the omnipresence and power of money, it is hardly necessary – far starker, unavoidable examples are to be found moored in the lagoon, flanking the route to the Giardini.
I do, however, like the idea that the human voice will be heard throughout this exhibition. I saw performances in the arena by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, which sample, loop and re-imagine traditional workers’ or chain-gang songs, and a capella renditions of Jeremy Deller’s collection of broadsides – songsheets sold in the streets in industrial Britain, some of which are reproduced close by. These daily performances are reminders of the social, embodied reality of labour. Work is, after all, not only a source of pain but also of pride, ambition and self-realization, and the sense of community and solidarity that these songs evoke is a necessary complement and counterpoint to Marx’s abstract theorizations.
Lorna Simpson, Nightmare?, 2015, graphite and ink on gessoed wood panel with aluminium perimeter
‘All the World’s Futures’ is an ambitious show. The breadth of ‘the world’ that is represented is laudable – artists from 53 countries are included, fifteen more than the ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ in 2013, an overdue and important corrective to previous editions of the biennale. And many of the issues that it addresses are urgent and affect us all. However, for an exhibition whose title might suggest looking forward, much of the work is caught up in the past. The danger of including so many archival or documentary projects is that the whole show gets caught up in wider ethical questions about what it means to document: is to show alone ever enough? Can we just point to the world’s problems? What does that mean in terms of responsibility, in terms of solutions? These are enormous questions and art doesn’t have all the answers. But this show doesn’t appear to be looking for them, transfixed as it seems to be – like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, which is discussed by Enwezor in his introduction – by the rubble of the past that builds up at its feet.
One of the strongest works in the Arsenale is Chantal Akerman’s Now (2015). This five-screen projection combines roving camera footage of the desert with a composite soundtrack of shouts, engines and what sound like gunshots. It’s like speeding through an empty Western film set to the soundtrack of a The Fast and the Furious getaway sequence – disorientating, dizzying, anxiety-inducing. It brought to mind an only half-joking refrain that stayed with me as I walked back through the exhibition: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.’